Log in

04:28 pm - VexedI was out all day yesterday, spent about 6 hours driving, and when I got home I thought I would flop out by the telly. But what to watch on Sunday evening? I switched on 'Vexed' which is a new comedy police procedural. God it was shite.

Obviously it's supposed to be transgressive and challenging, but it just comes across like it was written by a smirking ten year old. For the first half hour I sat their semi-somnolent, thinking 'Well, I won't tune in again, but there's nothing better on'. But about thirty minutes in it became so bad that I turned the telly off and went and argued with people on the Internets (some of them were wrong about stuff).

Scene: a cosy flat. On the floor is the corpse of a young woman (communicator adds - crucially she has auburn hair and though clothed is sprawled on her back with her legs slightly apart). A female detective is already on the scene. Her male colleague arrives.

Male detective: “It’s just that when you said ‘big ginger’, I thought you were gonna say ‘pussy’! [Snorts deliriously.] Ginger hair, ginger cat… ginger pussy! [Guffaws at length.]” (communicator adds - his laughter went on through the rest of this scene and into the next)

The Telegraph critic says:

Like many of the other scenes in this putative comedy drama, it left me pondering a deep and troubling question. Namely, am I losing my mind?

I just didn’t get it... I don’t know why the male detective thought his female colleague was going to say “pussy”, when she plainly wasn’t. Nor do I know why the idea made him snort with mirth, particularly given that he was looking at the body of a dead woman, the blood from a wound in whose skull was soaking into the rug. (The body was clothed, incidentally, which rules out a possible, if weak, reason for innuendo to be on the male detective’s mind.)

... At one point, while referring to another murdered woman, he used his hands to do the “boo hoo” sign, the one clowns make to represent tears.

I disagree with him here: I think these two examples actually explain quite a lot. The critic can't understand why this is supposed to be funny because he's a grown-up man.

The detective was looking at a woman's body supine, with her legs slightly apart, therefore the word 'pussy' is funny. He was talking about a woman's death therefore a pretend 'boo hoo' face is funny. Seriously, the 'jokes' (stretching the term) only make sense if you assume the tiresome misogyny of a teenage boy who has never kissed a girl. Possibly we are supposed to find it funny that the policeman is being misogynist, but - really - how much mileage is there in that joke? Misogyny is not exactly transgressive of social norms is it? If there's nothing but a policeman saying misogynist things about dead women, after half an hour you get the impression that someone is enjoying that one joke just a bit too much.

I can't remember the last time I posted on this blog saying something is unfunny, let alone for what you might uncharitably call political reasons. I'm not saying that 'we must resist the urge to find things like this funny', I'm saying I can tell these are supposed to be jokes by the way they are positioned in the story, but they just make me feel weary.

It's how it's done. Had the scene been competently put together, and done sharply, I could see the possibility of someone smart finding a funny joke in that scene. It's the fact that she's (a)not naked (b)the joke is told so badly that really kills it for me.

The whole point about Mrs Slocombe's pussy is that it's a cat and, in her mind, nothing else. Indeed it's highly probable that neither Miss Brahms nor Mr Grainger sees the double-entendre either. And Messrs Lucas, Humphries and Peacock, who do, have to keep the knowledge to themselves because they're gentlemen. The whole joke has to do with innocence and the preservation of same, and I think that's often the case with successful innuendo.

God knows what the intention was in this drama - to suggest that policemen are immature and misogynist, maybe? - but it came across as what Victoria Wood calls negative comedy, which she reckons doesn't work.

I didn't watch this but apparently it's written by one of the creators of Misfits. That had its unpleasantly sexist moments, but it wasn't as annoying as this sounds like because all the characters are meant to be screwed-up, anti-social juvenile delinquents.

This is a shame since I thought it might be quite interesting since it is by the bloke who did Misfits.

Although it might just have got off to a bad start. I just read a review of the second episode and he reviewer really liked it despite finding the first episode "one of the most excruciating things he'd ever seen".